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Flutter Entertainment owns online betting and gambling brands, including PokerStars, and makes money when customers play poker, place sports bets, and play casino games.
Flutter Entertainment is one of the world's largest online gambling companies. It runs a family of betting brands — PokerStars for online poker and casino games, FanDuel for sports betting in the United States, and Paddy Power and Betfair in the UK and Ireland — and it earns money by taking a small cut of the money customers wager. When you win a poker hand, the house rakes a slice of the pot; when you place a sports bet, the odds are set so the house keeps a margin over time. The customer is the player, and the product is entertainment that happens to involve real money.
The American business is the big story. FanDuel has become the leading sportsbook in the US, and that market only opened up broadly after a 2018 Supreme Court ruling let states legalize sports betting. Flutter moved its primary listing to the New York Stock Exchange in 2024 to be closer to that growth, even though the company is legally based in Ireland. PokerStars, the brand that built the company's global reputation, is now a smaller piece of a much bigger betting machine, and it faces stiff competition from rivals like DraftKings in the US and Entain's brands abroad. Gambling is a business with a sharp edge. Regulators in many countries cap how much companies can advertise, tax their revenue heavily, and tighten rules on things like affordability checks and bonus offers — all of which can squeeze profits. Flutter also carries the reputational weight of an industry that harms some customers, and it spends heavily on marketing and on technology to keep players engaged and to stay ahead of compliance rules.
The company throws off a lot of cash, and it uses that cash to buy back shares and pay down debt from big acquisitions, including its purchase of the Italian gambling group Sisal. The bet Flutter is making is simple: that legal, regulated online betting keeps growing, especially in America, and that owning the top brands in each market is worth more than the regulatory headaches that come with them.
Saved answer · last researched 21 Oct 2026